Welcome to the Cutting Edge Course Design Tutorial

Is it time to really shake the tree and do something about one of your courses? This tutorial will give you a way to get your arms around what is typically a daunting task and will guide you through a practical, effective strategy for designing or redesigning a course.

[If you are involved in professional development for faculty and would like information on how we run our course design workshops, plus suggestions for how to use this tutorial with faculty, visit the faculty professional development page for more information.]

What is this tutorial designed to help you do?

Articulate goals for a course or portion of a course.

Build a course or portion of a course that meets those goals and assesses student learning.

Explore a variety of teaching techniques that emphasize student engagement and that place responsibility for learning on the students.

Develop a plan for a rigorous, effective, and innovative course.

Why use our tutorial?

This tutorial provides a pathway through what can look like a big, amorphous, overwhelming task and presents a logical way to proceed from the glimmer of a good idea toward a new course while avoiding too much blundering in the dark. Read a short synopsis of our approach.

Using this tutorial lets you avoid wasting energy on reinventing the wheel. We provide links to hundreds of activities that can be used either directly or indirectly as templates, plus examples of goals and syllabi that can be used as catalysts for your own work and that were developed by other faculty.

We know that the design strategy in this tutorial works.

This tutorial is an on-line version of a face-to-face course design workshop run successfully by us for undergraduate geoscience faculty through On the Cutting Edge. Workshop participants comment that our course design process helped them to develop rigorous, effective, and innovative courses and to make thoughtful choices about what and how to teach.

In a follow-up survey of workshop participants, 90% of respondents followed through to teach the rigorous, goals-based, innovative course that they had begun to develop at the workshop. Furthermore, 80% of respondents found our course design process so useful that they followed it again when designing or redesigning another course.

Who is this tutorial for?

Most of the examples in this tutorial come from undergraduate courses in the geosciences, although some portions have links to examples from undergraduate courses in other disciplines.

Despite the focus on geoscience, the process is generic, and we've used simple examples. If you are interested in designing a course outside the geosciences, you should have little trouble using the tutorial.

News, Events, Workshops and Webinars from Teach the Earth

Learn More »

Is your department overhauling its curriculum? Have new faculty in your department? Is your department involved in strategic planning? Facing changing enrollment or striving to increase diversity? Want to increase the emphasis on teaching science in the context of societal issues?

InTeGrate & NAGT invite you to improve learning about the Earth in your courses, programs, & departments through our Traveling Workshops Program (TWP). Application deadlines are 1/31 and 3/15.

Teaching Landform Evolution with WILSIM-GCThe WILSIM project has developed a collection of teaching activities that explore the evolution of the Grand Canyon, and how the shape of the canyon is affected by a variety of physical factors, via the landscape simulation model WILSIM-GC. These activities range from step-by-step guided inquiry activities through open-ended exploration of the interactions of model parameters.

NAGT Events at AGU 2016NAGT is pleased to outline a variety of geoscience education sessions available at the Fall 2016 AGU Meeting in San Francisco next month. Stop by the NAGT booth (#308) for the most up-to-date information on upcoming workshops, educational resources, and teaching activities.

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The mission of The Geological Society of America is to advance geoscience research and discovery, service to society, stewardship of Earth, and the geosciences profession. We support geoscience education at every level. Join us at http://www.geosociety.org/

Provenance: NAGTReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

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The On the Cutting Edge website and workshop program are supported by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Join today and your membership will help ensure that this site can continue to serve geoscience educators. Join NAGT today

Provenance: NAGTReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

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The On the Cutting Edge website and workshop program are supported by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Your membership is helping to ensure that this site can continue to serve geoscience educators.